The value of document devices used by companies is greatly increased if the devices are compatible with software applications used by company employees. All but the smallest businesses and other enterprises today facilitate their operations through the use of various document process management systems that consist of network-connected digital computers, peripheral devices including document printers and scanners, and workflow applications software (FIG. 1). An individual user may access and control a peripheral device directly by means of a simple driver and graphical user interface (GUI) “window,” but the present invention addresses primarily the requirements for connecting peripheral devices and workflow applications. Typically, hardware and software components may be sourced from several vendors, and elements may be added, removed or changed frequently. The components are complex products of a range of dynamic technologies and the combinations required to support the workflows of particular operational processes may not have been anticipated in the design of every component. Thus it can be understood that there are many difficulties in designing, building and maintaining such systems. Many standards have been defined that seek to establish conventions for the partitioning of integrated systems and for the interfaces between the component elements. Several practical factors, including the very proliferation of such standards, have failed to prevent incompatibilities among the components that they seek to govern, and the dynamic nature of the technologies in this field gives rise to new device capabilities and to new software applications that outpace the standards efforts. Other significant difficulties are presented as a result of the number of different programming languages used for creating applications software and the different computing platforms and operating systems used in network devices. Therefore, ensuring that a particular enterprise application and a particular document device will interoperate effectively often requires a major engineering investment, which usually recurs for different applications or devices and whenever an application or device changes.